1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to interconnected computers and more particularly, the present invention relates to formatted data distributed on interconnected computers.
2. Background Description
Generally what is known as the Internet or World Wide Web (WWW) is a large scale network of globally connected computers. The Internet places an almost limitless amount of information at the fingertips of each connected computer user. The information is located at various globally connected computers, each at what is typically referred to as a “Web Site.” Each web site may include multiple accessible web pages linked to each other. Each web page is a data file encoded in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) or a similar browser friendly code. A web page may include one or more Hypertext links or Hyperlinks, each to a Universal or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) that points to a file at an Internet location. The file may be any type of file including but not limited to another HTML document or web page, a word processing document, compressed or uncompressed data or simple text.
Typical URLs specify the location of individual resources at a particular location or domain, but not necessarily in a compact way. An important feature of most domain names are intuitiveness indicating its origin and making memorization easier. Organizations may prefer domain names that reflect or are identical with the organization name, e.g., www.judicialwatch.org. A typical URL is a domain name followed by a path and, then with individual file names attached. So, a URL may become long and unwieldy and under some circumstances may be unusable without some form of compression.
These large unwieldy URLs may become troublesome, especially, when large numbers are being handled with limited resources. So, for example, using a wireless web appliance (such as a cellular phone (cell phone) or pager with a built in browser or a personal digital assistant (PDA) connected to the web with a wireless connection) memory, keystrokes and bandwidth may all be at a premium. Clearly, the more larger URLs that are being stored on the wireless web appliance, entered into the appliance's browser and being transmitted between the appliance and its ground station, the more of a problem these large URLs become. This problem is further exacerbated when a URL request from a wireless web appliance results in a display that includes several of these large URLs. Still other circumstances where these large unwieldy URLs may create a nuisance include when the URLs are embedded within some digital contents or in printed bar codes.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,835,718 to Blewett entitled “URL Rewriting Pseudo Proxy Server” teaches a real-time URL re-mapping method directed to the commercial needs of Internet businesses. Since internet advertisers and services charge for information access, customer interactions HTML based content must be recorded. Blewett teaches a method wherein customers interact with such content through a proxy machine that records the interactions. Thus, the customers' web based requests are directed to a proxy machine that maps that request to a URL where the desired content is located. However, Blewett does not allow any user to register codes for arbitrary URLs and the method of Blewett hides the true URL to further its goal of tracking requesters.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,895,471 to King et al., entitled “Providing a Directory of Frequently Used Hyperlinks on a Remote Server” teaches a directory server that stores directories associated with remote devices. As described in King et al., remote devices include storage, a display and a button and can receive and display hypermedia information based on an identifier, i.e., any state of the art internet browser. The devices also can send identifiers to the directory server, which may add them to the associated directory. A device also may request that the server retrieve previously stored information. Thus, the directory server stores bookmarks for the remote device owner and, merely returns the full URL to any device seeking access to the particular file or document located at the URL.
Further, America On Line (AOL) includes a feature in its service referred to as “keywords.” Typically, AOL sells keywords to vendors and then, males the keywords available for information look up. For example, AOL might sell “travel” as a keyword to a travel agency. So that when an AOL member enters the keyword “travel” in the AOL service, the member is directed to information at the travel agency's site. Normally keywords are short mnemonics that are easy to remember, something much shorter than a URL. This makes keywords easy to distribute, the vendor tells customers the keyword for later retrieval of information. Further, keywords are easily conveyed to an audience in radio or TV broadcasts or in print advertising. However, a human must manually enter keywords.
Accordingly, there is a need for efficient ways of identifying and selecting web based information that do not overload browser resources and seamlessly providing the selected web based information.